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Capturing Audio with Your Digital Video Camera

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DV cameras are really known for their great quality audio production. When you record an event and listen to the sound, you are notice any distortion. You even have two stereo soundtracks to work with. The best advantage for DV cameras is you can edit the audio portion without doing anything to the video. There are two methods that DV cameras do this that really makes it worth purchasing one:

• Pulse code modulation: DV cameras use pulse code modulation to record sound. PCM allows you to record in two different recording modes:
o Two channel – You can record in two channels, or 16-bit stereo, depending on how you wish to look at it.
o Four channel – Four channel, or 12-bit stereo has little less quality, but you can use two stereo channels instead of one.
• Sampling and Quantization: Another way to describe the above is when sound is captured by the DV camera’s microphone; the sound is converted into a digital signal. This conversion includes sample rates. What sampling does is measures the wave of the audio at a certain interval so it can be repeated at playback. The more often it is sampled, the more accurate the playback will be. Quantization takes the signal and converts it into a digital number. The value of the audio signal is stored using 16 bits.

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